There’s quite a wide range of topic in this week’s reading highlights. Listening, photography, paying attention and technology. If there’s a consistent theme in this selection, then it is the need to constantly be aware that music is...

“Progress over time” has become the Loch Ness Monster of the education world – some people claim to have seen it and others are desperately looking for it. In the search (for progress, not Nessie), teachers are often encouraged to focus on pace to...

This post continues a series looking at the process of designing of a scheme of work for music teachers. The first few posts looked at the scheme of work from a distance and now, we’re going to zoom in one stage closer to the unit plan. In the second...

Last week, I wrote about planning a scheme of work for music by looking at the values, structure and design tenets that you want to embed in the process. Taking the time to do this really does help to ensure that the lessons you end up teaching align with the...

When Helen Tierney asked me to speak at Middlesex University, she specifically asked me to give a few ‘survival tips’ for NQTs. It should sound strange to represent the first year of teaching as a journey into a dangerous wilderness but those of us...